


Every True Genius Is Bound To Be Naive

by hajimebassaidai



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Drama, Friendship, Gen, Kid Fic, Neurodiversity, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-23
Updated: 2012-01-23
Packaged: 2017-11-19 17:29:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/575802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hajimebassaidai/pseuds/hajimebassaidai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He had been chasing it for so long, he'd missed when he finally got it.</p><p>Realisation finally strikes shortly after the events of "The Daedalus Variations".</p>
            </blockquote>





	Every True Genius Is Bound To Be Naive

**Author's Note:**

> References to events of SG1 "48 Hours".
> 
> Written for rodneymckay-gen Thing-A-Thon prompt (Live Journal) of “Every true genius is bound to be naive” (Friedrich Schiller).

**“Every true genius is bound to be naive”**

When he first saw music written down Meredith wanted to know how it worked. Like everything around him, he had to understand it. Knowing how things worked was everything. His mother had sat at the piano, when she thought he was outside playing, “Because all children play Meredith, now get your butt out there. This discussion is over!”, and the baby was asleep. He'd listened to the music from just inside the doorway and wondered. He'd snuck in later and peered inside. Hammers, wires, keys and pedals. Pretty straightforward and so he lost interest, chasing the next great mystery to cross his path.

Then one day, when he figured he'd spent enough time outside, getting fresh air (and what was wrong with aircon?) he'd crept back to find his mother's voice ringing from the hallway complaining to her mother about how little Father understood her, how she was stuck in the house all day, how Meredith had dismantled the toaster this time etc, etc, etc. Meredith didn't hate outside enough to walk past that, thank you so much. It was as he turned that he saw the sheet music where his mother had left it out on the piano, just this once, caught unawares by the telephone.

This was different. This wasn't another mechanism, this was writing and this then was what made the music happen. Trying to see how the music worked, he didn't hear his mother come in and so she caught him, head tilted to the side, trying to see what this sounded like. He thought he'd made a mistake again but apparently, for once, this was right. Although only once he'd sworn blind that no, he hadn't touched and the piano and no, he hadn't touched the music, but then she'd still gone and checked (where was the trust around here? You dismantle a few kitchen appliances...) Meredith asked what the music meant and here, this, this question his mother could answer. These questions she was actually willing to answer, could show him how it worked. 

And it was beautiful. Clearly written timing, keys, quavers, speeds, clefts. Precise instructions on how to produce music produced by geniuses. Long dead great men. Their music living through his hands. His mother wanted him to play her kind of music. Meredith tried to ignore her fixation with John Lennon. He knew what he wanted to play. They'd learnt about Mozart for a school project. Mozart had found a way out through music and he'd written it down! All he needed to do was follow the instructions and he would do the same. He just had to practise. 

This new interest stirred his mother to finally make an effort for him. She found him a tutor, got him lessons and suddenly a whole world of composers was opened up. There it all was, laid out on page after page, as much music as he could want, written by people who were admired and obsessed over long after their deaths. They had position, they had worth.

Then Meredith was taken to hear a pianist perform live. “You'll get such a better feeling for it live. It just creates such a terrific atmosphere and really brings you in touch with the piece!” It certainly did, all those hundreds of people, hanging on every note that was played, waiting for the pianist to begin with baited breath. Jumping to their feet to allow him to bask in their adulation. No one complained about what he'd done, told him to go and play. No one ignored him. No one had ignored Mozart as a little boy. No, they clamoured to hear more and showered praise on him. This Meredith could do and so he did. Endlessly pursuing greater and better. Because practice makes perfect and so he poured all his energy and concentration at home into this and passed exam after exam. Here it was, solid proof, written in ink, that he was good. It got him acknowledgement but it still wasn't enough. A pat on the head wasn't all Mozart got! He had to get better. So he started entering competitions. He listened to the other children. He winced at their mistakes, their imperfect timing. How could they do that to the music, to that perfection? It made his skin crawl and he couldn't stand to sit in the room, listening to that, while he waited for his turn. It wasn't nerves. Why would he be nervous? He knew what perfection was, he strived to reach it and he knew he did. It was perfect and it was beautiful.

But it didn't do him any good. Time and again, he didn't win. His mother's interest began to wane because he wasn't good enough. Why? Why wasn't he good enough and so he asked his teacher and got his answer. 

He would never be great and nothing less than perfection would ever do. He couldn't achieve adulation and praise this way because he couldn't see it. There was something beyond what was there on the paper and he didn't have it, couldn't understand it. Couldn't grasp it and take it apart. 

So enough. He was done with music. He wasn't going to be like his mother, quietly playing when no one was listening, “for herself”. Well, numbers weren't like music. Science wasn't like music. Formulae and theorems were as static as music staves on a page but it didn't take an emotional understanding to reproduce the results. Simple, clean, straightforward. If I do this then this will happen. This Meredith could take apart and make work. A Science Fair didn't need emotional feeling, it need perfect logical understanding to win it and this he could do. So, listening to the talk of Ophenheimer in History, he picked the most impressive thing he could think of to finally win a prize and approval.

Well, he certainly got him attention but failed to win either a prize or approval but this was it, the right direction. All he had to do was keep at it, keeping learning more and getting better and he would be valued. So after weeks of funny looks and even more attention from those morons of adults, (terrorism? When did successful science become terrorism?) from his idiotic peers harassing him more than usual, (was fear mixed in with the mocking better or worse?) the family were moving. New town and new start and, for him, a new name. He had had it with Meredith McKay. Meredith thought he was good enough to be a world famous pianist. Rodney knew he could be a world shattering scientist. Just might want to keep that theoretical though. It was bad enough suffering the stupidity of others, suffering interrogations for being a terrorist was too much. It took up so much valuable time, time he'd never get back.

*****************************************************************************************************************************

He was a fully grown man and still his genius wasn't enough to make him popular! Instead of finally getting proper access to the Stargate to fix that bodge job Samantha Carter had made of the dialling programme, he was being forced to go to Siberia. He should have been so right. Why would anyone risk anything for an alien warrior? It wasn't like he wasn't replaceable. There was a galaxy of Jaffa out there, never mind the myriad of other races. But instead of his genius impressing this beautiful, and actually rather intelligent woman, he had managed to turn everyone against him and get himself sent to purgatory. Well he wouldn't quit. Here no one could steal his ideas and even in Siberia he was still at the front, on the cutting edge. He would do it, he would make them pay attention to him, see what a genius he was and give him that adoration, that standing ovation.

*****************************************************************************************************************************

“...The people here have become a sort of a, kind of a surrogate family to me...Maybe it won't be four years next time?...You love me? Really? All of you?...You were the closest thing to a best friend I ever had. I'm really, really sorry...Wait a minute. Doesn't that make me a really bad person?...Still, you talked a man into killing himself.. I want you to remember me as I am; as your genius friend....” 

So here he is, sitting in a far away Galaxy, at a dining table, contemplating his rather unexpected return. He had nearly lost it all. He had felt his mind escaping, like water flowing through his fingers. No matter how hard he tried to hold on all his genius, all that knowledge that he had pushed, shoved and sacrificed to achieve had been drifting away from him. The rest of his mind not far behind it either. But they had risked death just to say goodbye to him properly, to talk one last time. 

But then they had also stuck with him to the end when he had screwed up. Well, not quite his screw up, rather that of another Rodney McKay who doomed his team by his failure to figure their way out of a mistake made by yet another Rodney McKay. Another failure to reach that perfection, that understanding. Yet they hadn't abandoned him then either, when there was no way out. They all died together in that room. So looking out over the dual moonlit sea stretching out from the window, he found himself wondering about who missed that Rodney, the one who died with his team all around him. Remembered all those words he'd uttered amongst what even he knew to be a fairly ever-lasting flow. He still pushed for perfection, still needed to understand it all, still needed approval and recognition of his worth and what he could do but here was something that he had had such trouble grasping. Somewhere long the line he had achieved what had started his quest for brilliance for its own sake. He had attention, recognition and love. 

He had always known he was naïve about people but they had always been so much harder to understand than science. And he realised his own idiocy at it; it taking it being proven time and time again that these people around him now didn't need him to be infallibly brilliant to get their attention. He had it anyway and had done for years. He finally had people who cared deeply for him and he for them.

Last lesson though, freshly learned, was this. They would stick around through to the end. He had reached across time to bring them all back and they would do it for him just as readily. As he heard the footsteps come up behind him to the team table, as trays were set down, Rodney realised that his hardest lesson in all this was going to be to finally accept that his place among them was secure. Death, the passage of thousands of years or the evaporation of his genius hadn't been enough to destroy his strange little family. He'd just have to wrap his genius intellect around that completely illogical concept.

 

naive (from thefreedictionary.com)

1\. Lacking worldly experience and understanding

 

Stargate SG1 Redemption Part 2, "Music…was my salvation. It had this…perfect order for me."

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: Quotes from "Letters From Pegasus", "McKay & Mrs Miller", "Tao of Rodney", "Sunday", "Tabula Rasa", "Miller's Crossing" and "The Shrine" or SG1 "Redemption Part 2" are not mine, the quotes are checked on Gateworld and StargateWiki. Neither the dialogue, nor Stargate: SG1, nor Stargate Atlantis or even Gateworld or StargateWiki are mine in any way, shape or form!
> 
> Originally published on 23 January 2012.


End file.
